The present invention relates to full fat milled flax seed and particularly to a method of forming the product which enhances stability and shelf life.
Flax has been used as a food product for many centuries and has in recent years received increasing attention in view of its particular nutrition properties.
The milling of flax into flour is also of course well known and has been widely used. One problem with flax flour and particularly full fat milled seed has however been its limited stability and shelf life by which the flour and products manufactured from the flour can degrade to such an extent that the product becomes of limited use or unusable.
There has therefore been ongoing concerns with and attention to improving the shelf life of the product. It has been previously established that increased values of the following four measurements of Lipid Peroxides, malonaldehyde, alkenals and free fatty acids of the components of the product are indicative of the gradual degradation of the product over time.
It is further well known that the use of green or partly green seeds, generally caused by harvesting the seeds while immature, can lead to reduced quality of certain seed products. Thus a supply of the seed containing high numbers of green seeds is well known to provide a reduced quality of the seed so that generally the seed of such poor quality receives a lower price. The immature seeds generally have a lower density and therefore can often be sorted so as to be extracted from the mature seeds using techniques responsive to the differing densities of the mature and immature seeds.
Canadian and American standards for flax seed quality therefore often designate that samples containing higher quantities of immature seeds are unacceptable for many end uses.
Even however taking into account the removal or reduction of immature seeds, there remains an important objective to further improve the stability and shelf life of the full fat milled flax seed product for improved quality of supply to the end user.
Full fat milled seed is defined as the product milled by any suitable milling process including grinding and impact techniques where the whole seed is milled without any prior extraction of oil or other component.
It is one object of the present invention to provide a method for improving the stability and shelf life of full fat milled flax seed product.
According to one aspect of the invention there is provided a method of manufacturing full fat milled flax seed comprising:
providing a supply of flax seed;
milling the flax seeds into a flour; and
increasing the stability and shelf life of the flour by selecting for the supply flax seeds based upon the criterion that the flax seeds contain no more than 5% of flax seeds which are distinguished from the remainder of the seeds by visually distinguishable a darker color.
According to a second aspect of the invention there is provided a method of manufacturing full fat milled flax seed product comprising:
providing a supply of flax seed;
milling the flax seeds into a flour; and
increasing the stability and shelf life of the flour by extracting from the supply of flax seeds those seeds which are distinguished from the remainder of the seeds by a visually distinguishable darker color to provide a level of distinguished seeds in the supply which is less than 5%.